John William Pope Foundation President John Hood praises Safelight’s Dandelion Eatery, which received a $100,000 grant to expand its commercial kitchen. If we can help people help themselves and break that cycle and be productive citizens there’s nothing more beautiful than that.”
Pope Foundation president John Hood praised the Dandelion for its solution-based program that hires domestic violence victims as interns and by training them as cooks and servers helps them break the cycle of dependence and abuse.
The Dandelion project is “not just something that is benefiting one community but we hope a program that will inspire others to do similar things in their community,” Hood said. “We have some ideas about how that might work but we know there’s a lot we don’t know, and one of the purposes of the Joy Pope Memorial Grant was to discover ideas, to support them, to nurture them and to make other people aware of them across the state.”
Safelight’s mission to “make hope real” is a fitting match for the Pope Foundation’s mission to find and spread the word about nongovernment human services solutions that work.
“That is a mission we are privileged to invest in,” Hood added.